


If Your Dancing Doesn't Do the Trick

by Mama_Nihil



Series: Diamonds and Curls [2]
Category: Joker (2019)
Genre: Also some sex - ish, Angst, Blood, Developing Relationship, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Father issues, Joker style, Purple Prose, Suicide Attempt, and all good things, and cryptic conversation, and dancing, and some not so repressed, because nothing is ever straightforward with this guy, chamber drama, gratuitous ogling, perhaps I'm the one who needs to be locked up, repressed violent urges, sentimentality, so if that's your thing, talk talk talk, what we have here is a case of the female gaze, which means there are razors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2019-11-20
Packaged: 2021-01-26 23:04:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21382063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mama_Nihil/pseuds/Mama_Nihil
Summary: Six months have passed, and things have stabilized. Harley is Joker's chronicler and right hand woman, but there are boundaries not even she can cross. There's nothing he fears, except that one thing, that one banal thing that no one else would even find dangerous. So far she's respected it, but Harley is still a curious cat. After a quiet night in with razors, can she keep her hands off that ultimate prize?
Relationships: Arthur Fleck/Harleen Quinzel, Joker/Harley Quinn
Series: Diamonds and Curls [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1561540
Comments: 30
Kudos: 75





	1. Venus in furs

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, I... have no idea. As per usual. And sequels are scary and often a bad idea, but this goddamn movie won't leave me alone. I don't really know where to go with this other than I want Harley to dig deeper. Takes place after my other Joker fic, _What You Fucking Deserve_.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Whiplash girl child in the dark  
Comes in bells, your servant, don't forsake him  
Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart
> 
> ([Velvet Underground](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLQzaLr1enE))

Tonight was all about his arms and neck. He didn’t wear a shirt, perhaps to help her, perhaps because he enjoyed this as much as she did – if that was even possible. Enjoyed the pull of muscle, of tendons stretching, of skin caressed by the warm night air in their underground lair. Did he draw pleasure like she did from the movement of naked arms and hands, of hair that brushed his shoulders, and ribs that pushed at skin from within?

The slow-motion dance of loving his own body?

But it was work, she mustn’t forget that. Pen in hand, she kept her eyes on him as he moved. The sinewiness of his forearms, the lopsided angle of his shoulders. With each sweeping motion of his hands, extensors bunched and flexors yielded, and she noted every shift, every ripple. His fingers pinched and spread, delicate and poetic, as if he was picking imaginary flowers. Red flowers, fire-yellow. Poison green.

Every now and then she scribbled. She noted similarity and difference, minute changes from yesterday. She documented positions where there was room for pain to creep in. He wanted to know if he was risking fatigue, if he was conserving energy or not. By her knee lay a book on anatomy for reference – _his_ anatomy, not some generic encyclopedia. It was all in her handwriting. She even drew a quick sketch of him for good measure. Scratch, scratch, scratch, lightning-quick. It wasn’t meant to be art, she just wanted to capture that habit of his where he reached too much, putting pressure on a neck and spine that had had enough for a lifetime. 

She knew why he did it. He wanted to reach past his limitations, or maybe even back through time, to compensate for a distance he wasn't aware of. But that bending was not a good idea.

Beneath the drawing she jotted down a page number and a date. Then she flipped to another tab, the one for questions that could wait, that needed the perfect moment or he’d retreat into his shell. A page for the sensitive issues she couldn’t just bring up out of the blue. It needed tact, perhaps even wine and darkness – a softening of walls she couldn’t always achieve, especially not now with the project he was finalizing.

Maybe after, if it was successful? Maybe then she could gently probe that age-old sore: his self-chosen exile from humanity, his withdrawal to godly status from whence he was spending the rest of his life trying to escape. One fateful decision almost nine years ago, and an eternity to atone for it. He kept insisting it was what he wanted, but his body told another story. It constantly sought to bridge that chasm, to come back to the world of men. It pushed him to breaking point just to make a connection.

_Even though I’m right here_.

As she returned to the 'today' tab, she wondered if she’d made a mistake, drawing the sketch where he’d be able to see it, but it was too late now. She couldn’t erase it, because she did nothing in pencil, only in ink. Once recorded, it couldn’t be undone, and she would never tear out a page. It was all part of the chronicle. It was why she was indispensable: her books were a complete record of his life, a labyrinth only she knew her way around. _He_ knew the work, he saw the thread that began in the overture of new connections and ended in the crescendo of destruction, but without her pen to document it, he'd be lost. He laid his life in her hands and forgot about it. 

She was the taken for granted one. It sounded awful, but it wasn’t. If you couldn’t take your assistant for granted, what good was she? 

_If you’re looking for something Bechdel-worthy, _she wrote in the margin, _turn back now. I won’t have a single thought that doesn’t have to do with him._

His arms fell, and she sprang to attention. What now? Frowning, he reached for his cigarettes. “Well, that was shit.”

She smothered a smile. “Yep. Total bollocks.”

He clicked the lighter five times before it ignited – yes, she counted, it was in her marrow to note everything by now – and tossed it on the table as he inhaled. His stomach caved in briefly, muscles contracting with breathing, and then relaxed. Smoke streamed out of his nose as he gave her a sharp look. “This is part of it,” he explained, perhaps for the hundredth time. “It’s an art, Harley.”

“Which is why I’m spending the prime of my life documenting yours.” It came out hard, and his nose twitched – a tic that no longer scared her. “Who are you trying to convince? Yourself or me?”

He sucked angrily at the cigarette. “Whatever.” He sat on the bed beside her, Arthur again: not so much resting bitch face as resting Hamlet-on-the-brink-of-suicide face. How a person looked when they stopped pretending.

_And beautiful. Let’s not kid ourselves._

“So.” She crossed her arms. “What do you want to know?”

He shrugged. “How was it?”

“You were tense.”

He glanced at her notebook, but she wasn’t quoting from that. Her notes were too detailed. This was her summary, the succinct soundbite. He didn’t have time for anything else.

He sighed inaudibly. “So what do I do?”

_Imagine a beach_, flitted through her mind, but he wouldn’t rest on a beach. He would count the beats between waves.

Before she could flip through her mental index for something else, he said, “Never mind. Can I see?”

He held out his hand. She allowed herself one look at it, one mental sketch of those photogenic lines: his hand looked like an example drawing from an artist’s guidebook. _This is how you shadow tendons, this is how knuckles work. _Such useless beauty, caught in the service of chaos.

Then she handed him the book. _The sketch_, she remembered, but it was too late. He would see it, and they’d take it from there. Maybe the thoughts she’d had as she drew it wouldn’t be visible in the lines. Maybe they wouldn’t have to have The Talk just yet.

Grinding out the cigarette in the ashtray, he flipped the book open with one thumb on the ‘today’ tab and the other one holding the stack of future pages. As his eyes fell on his likeness, he stilled. His eyes flitted over her scribbled notes on height of elbow and movement of shoulder muscles, the correlation between the energy he spent and the energy he might get in return. Because yeah, it was an equation. That’s what being a leader was. He couldn’t just sit back and relax and expect things to happen all on their own. To some extent he _had_ to break his body to make his minions dance, and Harley wasn’t here to tell him he must slow down. She provided the data so he could decide exactly how much torture was enough.

The book fell from his hand – a short fall to the softness of sheets beneath. “Something you want to tell me?”

So he saw. “No,” she stalled, even though she knew it wouldn’t work.

“You know I can’t hold back. Not now. Not so close to the premiere.”

“I know.”

“So what’s this?” He gestured at the drawing.

“It was just a moment in time,” she snapped. “How you look.”

“You don’t know what it takes to do what I do.”

The accusation was an ice pick in her chest. Winded, she couldn’t find her voice.

“I’m… sorry.” His voice was soft again. “I just don’t know…”

… how to do this? Well, neither did she. They both had impossible jobs.

He rubbed his face, looking weary now. Weary and grey. All the aches and sores in his muscles asking for attention, for sympathy, for a day off. She could do something about that, but he wouldn’t let her. She’d never even asked, that’s how off limits it was.

As if he sensed the dangerous thought, he lay down with his back to her. Turning her head, she traced his exposed silhouette with her eyes: the shoulder sticking up, the stray hairs glinting in the warm lamplight. God, she wanted to… She didn’t even know. Brand him? Mar that smooth surface? His hair curled against his neck, thick and chocolate-rich. Burrowed into the sheets like this, he looked so vulnerable, so defenseless, but his hair was vibrant and strong. As if his fetal position could only do so much, and the truth came out in those lush locks. She longed to touch it, to run her fingers deep in the rough silk of it, but she held back, because…

Because it was a strange thing, the two of them. They could tussle and wrestle at a moment’s notice, but any softer touch needed to be negotiated. As if it burned.

“Hey?” Her breath barely stirred the air.

He didn’t reply, but there was a slight stiffening in his back, like someone steeling themselves for a beating.

“Can I…” She closed her eyes, feeling foolish.

_No_. He didn’t say it, but she felt it. His muscles trembled with it, his skin stretched over sudden panic.

“Okay. Sorry.” She lay down on her back and looked up at the ceiling. She wanted to gather him up in her arms and squeeze the life out of him. She wanted to trail her fingers over his cheekbones and grip the hair behind his ears and rip it out. She wanted to kill him with caresses. Breathing slowly, deliberately, she fought to transform the images in her head to something a little more housetrained, but what was the point? He made her mad.

He looked over his shoulder. “How come you haven’t killed me yet?”

She smiled. Always in tune, always on a wavelength. She shrugged against the mattress. “Because the fantasy is better than the reality. How about you?”

He gave a soft snort. “I don’t know.” Turning fully and propping himself up on his elbow, he looked down at her. _Stroke my cheek_, she thought. _Lay your hand on my throat. Crush me_. “It would be too easy?”

She sighed. “I know.” She glanced up above her head where an assortment of pillows lay stacked against the wall in place of a headboard.

He smiled. “That’s one way. A bit impersonal if you ask me.”

“You should write a book. The pros and cons of murder methods.”

“_You_ should write it.”

She raised an eyebrow. “That’s what I’m here for.”

Silence descended, a tense silence that questioned what she’d said. Because was that really the reason? Why exactly was she here, half a year down the road? Their mock contract had stayed the same for six months, and they both got something out of it, but…

But.

He raised a finger, hovered near her mouth, eyes on hers with sudden uncertainty in them – not fear, not awkwardness, not anymore, but the soul-piercing uncertainty of a rollercoaster untethered, hurtling into thin air. _Where are we going? What will the next moment bring? Is this the touch that will destroy us?_

She gave a tiny nod, and his finger alighted on her nether lip. He traced the smudges that never really disappeared, followed their meandering path over sensitive skin, caught in the corner of her mouth and traveled up to her cupid’s bow. Too tender. _So you can do this, but I can’t?_ she asked him silently. His finger stopped, withdrew, but he still gazed down at her, a million impossible scenarios playing out in his evening-dark irises. It was a kind of intimacy, this faltering on the edge of true danger. They both reveled in it, and they both toyed with pushing past it but never could.

He stood up abruptly. “We need to work.” Walking over to the table, he adjusted the lamp, opened a drawer underneath it, and took out the playing cards. Harley groaned, and he made to flip a card at her. Ducking on instinct, she bristled at his mocking laughter. “I would _never_,” he said sweetly.

“Never what?” she muttered, but got up and sat on the only other chair. Holding out her hand, she said, “Glue.”

He handed her the bottle. It was half empty by now, but the deck was also half done. Putting the finished cards to the side, Arthur picked up an unmodified one and gingerly eased the tip of a razor in between the layers of plastic-covered paper.

“And _bag_?” she said impatiently. He smothered a smile as he reached for it and tossed it to her. Rolling her eyes, she emptied it on the table. Then she lighted a candle and picked up one of the razors. Holding the edge into the flame until it softened, she pulled at the blade with a tweezer until it came loose, and dropped it with a faint plink on his side of the table. He picked it up and slid it into place between the folds. His face was intent, but he still seemed relaxed where he sat cutting the playing cards open, making a slit and inserting the razorblade. It was meticulous work, requiring all his concentration. The lamplight pierced his irises, making them look like glass marbles, and the lines in his face softened a little. This kind of thing did him good. It was his personal little therapy session, unendorsed by the authorities. Mindless, but with a purpose. A slice of domestic harmony, Joker style.

She took the card he’d finished and dabbed some glue into the slit to seal it shut. “These fumes will make us mad for real, you know.”

He gave a soft snort, eyes still on the playing card, head ducked to see better in the angled light. “Yeah…” His eyes flicked up to hers. “You’re saying I’m not mad enough?”

“Everything’s relative.”

He straightened up, hands going still on the table. Oh shit. She could hardly keep her countenance. These moments of quiet never did last long. “I can be mad,” he said softly.

“You have nothing to prove,” she mumbled, but her pulse was quickening, excited, _hoping_. What now? What fresh insanity was waiting to take her places she’d never even imagined?

He leaned forward and rested his chin in his hand. Perusing her. Sliding those glass marbles over her skin like a tongue, hot and cold. Down her cheek, down her throat, inside her collar, like living things, like snakes. She shivered.

“Cold?” It was mocking. Of course he knew she wasn’t cold. This was his hold on her, the magnetic pull neither of them could live without. The natural force you’d be a fool to argue with. “Take off your shirt.”

Her hands had gripped the hem before the thought had even formed. The fabric was rough like paper when it slid up her body and slipped off. It landed with a sigh on the floor, and his eyes made her turn in the chair, their pantomime so perfected over the months it was as if they shared a mind. The next thing she felt was the tiny, sharp chill of the razor on her shoulder blade. It hesitated there, a pinprick of exhilaration.

Her mind touched the people she'd known, the boyfriends she'd had in a previous life. How would she explain this to them?

How very glad she was that she didn't have to.

His mouth hovered close to her skin as he breathed a moist, “Yes?”

In answer, she reached a hand back and pulled her hair to one side.

The razor punctured skin. At first there was nothing, no sensation at all. Just a hot, tingly feeling, the harbinger of pain. And then… the reality of it, hitting with full force. The blade carving a path through pampered flesh, marking it, burning it. The severing of tissue, of nerve ends, the laying bare of inner secrets glistening in red. She felt the J take form, slowly, agonizingly slowly, and she pressed her teeth together, breath hitching at the cornucopia of feelings. Her whole body went warm, then cold, then warm again. This was a point of no return, but the cut had already been made inside, in whatever passed for her heart. This was just the outward sign. She felt blood trickle down her back, and his fingers touched it reverently. He did like the sight of blood, but then yeah, so did she. There was a reason they both wore red.

A moment’s hesitation. Then she turned around. He was pale, disoriented, pupils dilated. She wrenched the razor from him and got up, pushing him face down into the table. When she held him in place with her elbow on his neck and one hand gripping his wrist, he trembled beneath her but made no attempt to escape. She rested her hand on trembling muscle and tried to keep the razor steady, but when the first swirl of the H took form in bubbling scarlet, it looked clumsy like a child’s. She’d never written on a body before. She was back in grade one, a stupid girl trying to follow the rules, but this was a different school and there was no matronly sneer to tell her the flourishes she made had no place in the rational functionality of modern lettering.

The loop dipped down low and seared its way up again, tearing a gasping moan from the man beneath her. He breathed in shallow starts, ribs jerking, and she waited a moment before pushing the blade down and finalizing the H with another flesh-ripping loop that almost went up to his collarbone. Jesus. She’d made way more damage than him, but when he sat up, he looked pleasurably woozy, like a normal person after a blowjob.

For a moment. Then the crazy light switched on in his eyes and she gasped a laugh because yes, she’d done it now. She'd sealed her fate for tonight. He stood up and grabbed her in one motion, pulling her to the bed and crawling on top of her, _finally_, goddammit she needed his weight on her, she needed to feel how his legs slipped in between hers, rough and warm, to feel his ribs dig into hers as he breathed, his soft but Christ so undeniable cock in her crotch, and his mouth on her throat, nose against her jaw, Jesus _God_.

“I can’t,” he hissed, “you know that. Too many chemicals still in my system.”

“You’re such an _idiot_,” she whispered back. “What do you think I want? I don’t give a fuck about your fucking cock.”

He pressed his forehead against hers, hard, too hard, and she pushed him away. His eyes when he looked down at her were still desperate. “You do.”

She rolled her eyes. “Jesus, I like that it’s there, okay? So shoot me. But I don’t _need_ it.”

His teeth came out, oh fuck. She went limp, sank into the mattress. “Arthur…”

“You know what I do in my head?”

“I can imagine.”

“Everything. There’s nothing I can’t do.”

“I don’t give a _fuck_.”

At least the desperation made him push himself against her, grind into her everywhere, pressing skin and bone and muscle into the soft give of her body. He stroked his cheek roughly against hers, and even though he’d shaved it felt slightly raspy. Not enough to dig trenches, but enough to burn, to highlight her aliveness: that her skin was a living thing, and possible to hurt. As if his little stunt just now hadn’t been convincing enough. 

He moved to her throat, panting into her, marking her with his damp heat. His hair chafed her face and tickled her lips. His smell rubbed into her, molecules disintegrating and mingling. She disappeared into his breath.

And there it was, his hand, right on cue. He’d learned her paths now, knew what she needed, and his fingers sank into her slippery heat like a fucking space ship docking, so goddamn satisfying. _Harder_, she begged silently, and he pressed into the squishy walls of her need with an almost-anger that had her unraveling quickly. She wanted it to last, but she wanted it too much, and there was no way to hold back, not with him. She’d always hated the phrase ‘make love’, and like the answer to her prayers he never did that, not even close. He fucked her like you force-fed a fucking goose, just everything at once rammed into tingling hollows that needed invasion to feel alive.

He was a genius with explosions, Joker was. She was no exception.

When he was done with her, sound returned to the world in a whoosh: reality, augmented. They were both still bleeding, breathing in canon, dragons landing after mating in mid-air with their claws out. Another night ending in quiet insanity, and neither of them knew the words to seal it. The language didn’t exist that explained what they were together.

Clearing her throat, she just said, “You know… if you want me to reschedule the… _event_… move it forward so you can rest a little...?” Her voice sounded strange in the aftermath of coming. Too ordinary, too calm. 

His eyebrows twitched in a brief frown. “I can’t.” He raised a hand to silence her. “I know I’m driving myself too hard, but there’s no other way. You see them. They _need_ it. They’re this close to sinking into complacency. I’m the vitamin shot. I’m…”

“… at your wits’ end.”

His lips parted, but he didn’t reply at once. There were no clocks in here, and yet she could feel the ticking of seconds. Then he mumbled, “How do you draw that conclusion?”

“You need connection, and you’re not getting it.”

His head turned, and his gaze nailed her in smoky grey-green. “Connection.” His surface sneer did nothing to hide the vital organ she’d pierced. _Wow, that was easy. Six months of pussyfooting, and I only needed to just come out and name it? _Or was it the wound that did it? The softening of barriers through the edge of a blade?__

Slowly, to give him the chance to recoil – she raised her hand to his arm. As she hovered there, waiting for permission, his eyes turned lost and dark, like those of a hunted animal. As if he was silently asking, _You really want to hurt me like this?_

_Yes_.

Laying her hand on his bicep, she stroked downwards – gently, slowly, but painfully. It was the gentleness itself that hurt, she knew that. It was too alien. Too little too late. _Babies learn their body’s boundaries through touch_, the remnants of her education reminded her. _And sometimes things… go wrong_.

He didn’t take his eyes off hers as she lifted her hand, moved it back up to his shoulder, and stroked down his arm again. He hadn’t given his explicit consent, and she touched him anyway, touched him with something other than a wish to dominate or provoke, their usual sparring that was totally safe. Not that it didn’t brew inside her right this minute. He was cotton-warm and murder-soft, and it took all she had not to grab him, maul him, crush him with her weight. But this wasn’t going to be one of their usual play-battles. This was something else.

It took all she had to whisper, “Turn over.”

Still that cornered look, the predator trapped in his lair with only the last resort of victims: to go limp. To play dead. _Harley_, he mouthed, and it raked her heart.

_Trust me_, she mouthed back, and his face contorted in hate or fear, she wasn’t sure and she couldn’t afford to analyze it right now. She’d already breached the first barrier, and if she stopped now she would only leave him with the damage.

A moment passed. Then he rolled over. Slowly, stiffly, like a man with an invisible wound reaching for a salvation he’d never have, and the last place he’d find it was on his fucking stomach. His face disappeared into a pillow, and his hands grabbed the folds as he offered his naked back to her. A helpless position, allowing her to read the lines he couldn’t see, the tautness in his shoulder blade, the places he hurt that had nothing to do with the razor. Sitting up, she straddled him. Hesitated. Was she really going to do this? Her hands hung in the air above him, some remnant of empathy staying them.

And then she laid them on his back. Softly, softly, sadism in its purest form, she stroked him from neck to waist. She avoided the H, even though he might have preferred that she rip it open. Instead her fingers slid over bumps and hollows, palms sampling the warm silk of his skin, studded with imperfections. And underneath it all, he was shuddering. She’d meant to massage the stiffness out of his muscles, she really had, but that would have made sense. Instead she was just stroking him, caressing someone who feared caresses more than blows.

Why?

Because of the feeling that rushed through her with a sharp sweetness that topped any orgasm. Because something was _happening_. Because this man who ruled the world was ruled by her, and she didn’t need to kill him, or threaten him, she could just lay her hands on his back and feel him come apart at the seams. She’d found her calling, the truth in her heart of darkness: she was a warped healer who mended hurts with pain.

It went on forever, she didn’t know how long, she didn’t feel the minutes slip away, but it ended when he started crying. Like a cable being cut: lights going out, stereos falling silent. She lifted her hands, sudden fear exploding in all cells at once. She’d meant for it to happen, and she hadn’t. But now it had, and there was no repairing it. He was lying there underneath her, naked and frail, shaking with quiet sobs. The bane of Gotham, the snapper of fingers, the say-so guy.

She’d broken him.


	2. Love child

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What if I had the power to move you?  
What if I wasn't losing these battles I choose?  
What if I knew the words that would soothe you?  
What if I didn't know you at all?
> 
> ([Atlas, Yavin Calypso](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvSjvR5BuPo))

It was hideous. She’d seen him sort-of-cry before, seen the way his eyes sometimes filled when he laughed, the grief-stricken grimace his crazy grin almost managed to conceal – but _this_… This was the full flower. This was primal. He wept like a child at the brink of existence, lost in space.

Cold all over, she clambered off him, left him some room. Edged away towards the other side of the bed. His fists gripped the pillow hard, harder, hard enough to burst veins. Gasping for breath, he raised his head – and his face was unrecognizable. A snarling wolf was trying to burst free of his human frame. The final barrier had been breached, and the prison was open. Everything in there was free to run.

The way he turned to stare at her, unseeing, the way he rose from the bed… She went weak. Fuck. _Fuck_. He was _livid_. Face wet, his whole body shook with rage. He was a starved panther, a horror movie scarecrow. She didn’t know this man.

_He’s going to kill me.  
_

He moved towards her, and she scrambled off the bed, made a dash for the door. _I’m an idiot. An idiot to think this wouldn’t happen. So blind. Same blindness as every battered woman in history_… She fumbled for the lock, hands limp and lifeless like they didn’t belong to her, no link to her brain. Through the corner of her eye she saw him grab her bat, oh shit, he was really going for it. This was the end. A raucous yelp tore through her throat as her knees gave way and her forehead hit the door, the door to freedom, to a life that was slipping away by the second. Turning, because she had to see, had to know what her final moments brought, she slumped against the flat surface. Above her, his face was a ghoulish mask. He held the bat in front of him, eyes lost in some other world. Didn’t he see her? Didn’t he know what he was about to do?

He raised it, every muscle in his body contracting to bring it down on her…

Until snap, the focus changed. In a single moment it all shifted, because some jarring detail gave it all a different meaning, and she gasped: he wasn’t aiming at her. He–

No – fuck, _no_–

It was instantaneous. Without thought, without preparation, she sprang up from the floor and threw herself at him, drawing on a secret well of strength to make that desperate leap. The world shook, and she slammed into him so hard the bat flew straight into the opposite wall and clattered onto the table, sending the razors jumping. Their bodies tangled and fell. His head just barely missed the bedpost – shit, she hadn’t even thought, she could have fucking killed him herself – and they landed in a mess of limbs on the floor. She grabbed at his wrists, they shook but she caught them, and she held them as he curved into a rigid crescent beneath her with his hands grasping at nothing like useless claws. His eyes were wide and pale. His breath shuddered in jerky starts between his teeth and blew out his cheeks. He blinked – twice, three times – and his stomach muscles jerked as abortive laughter tried and failed to find a way out of his body.

He was freezing cold.

Heart hammering, she just lay there on top of him, holding him down, all her feeble protective instincts blocked because right now they were fucking poison. Another gentle touch and he might snap for good. So she kept still, a single thought in her head _just_ _weigh him down, just weigh him down_. She tried to remember things from her education, examples from textbooks that could help, but her mind was blank, and anyway this man didn’t fit any formula. She only had herself and her intellect, just her hands and her brain and the threadbare hope that this too would pass. The wound on her shoulder blade throbbed hotly, and she thought of his, pressed against the sandy floor, dirt finding a way into his blood. But she didn’t dare move or he would wrench free, would fucking kill himself.

He’d meant to go for the head, no hesitation at all. Just smash bang, lights out, show’s over.

The only escape from whatever was in there?

At the end of an eternity, his chest didn’t shudder anymore. He just lay there, unblinking, frozen in a living rigor mortis. Infinitely slowly, she extricated herself and sat back with her head against the edge of the table – uncomfortable as fuck, but she couldn’t think about that right now. Couldn’t risk any sudden movements, any changed M.O.

Eyelashes quivering – first sign that he was still alive – he glanced up at the tabletop. Shit. The playing cards, the razorblades. But if she stood up to move them out of his reach, he might run to the hallway for his gun. Or the medicine cabinet. There was no shortage of ways to off yourself in their home sweet home.

Apparently giving up on the razors, he let his eyes slide down to hers. She’d never seen them so… empty. Or was that what it was? Maybe they were actually full – full of ghosts, haunted by things long dead, specters she’d awakened with her vicious attack. She watched him with a kind of frantic, forced calm, as if by watching she could stay his hand, direct his thoughts away from whatever was holding them hostage.

A memory: back when he first came to her apartment, and her thinking she wouldn’t want to live with his demons 24/7. Well, now they were all up and dancing, and here she was, his only connection to reality, his only human contact. The criminal world didn’t count, they weren’t even people in his eyes. No, if anyone was responsible for him, it was her.

And she’d hit her incompetence ceiling tonight.

He whispered something. Moving slowly – _is this okay? is this the right cable to cut on the bomb?_ – she leaned closer. “What?”

“It was him.” It came out staccato, a breathless giggle that sounded more like a whimper. “He did it.”

“Who?” she whispered.

He closed his eyes. “I can _see_ him.” He laughed again, a wheezy sound. 

Harley swallowed. At least he was talking. That was a good sign, right? Fuck, she couldn’t remember. Her brain had switched off.

He shifted, and she tensed, back on red alert. But he only sat up with a quiet moan, scraped himself off the floor like something squashed underfoot. Folding his legs with his elbows on his knees, he hung his head. “Is there no end to the fucking epiphanies?”

Harley said nothing. There was nothing to say. If he wanted to explain, he would.

He rubbed his face, and some color came back, some normal fucking time passing in the normal fucking form of seconds. She stroked her own arm, _there there, danger’s past_, but it was never past, it was the way she lived now.

“The papers wrote about it.” Arthur sighed – was it Arthur? Who the fuck knew, and were they even different? He was a million people and one. He contained multitudes.

“Wrote about…?”

“But they pinned it on some junkie. Some loser ‘boyfriend’ they could prosecute. Expendable. _Fuck_.” He ran his hands through his hair and left them there, gripping clumps of it as he stared at the floor between his legs. “I should have known. People don’t just punch each other like that. They don’t.” A sudden chuckle. “Not even me.”

For a second, Harley wondered if she should reach for her book – but no, that would be the height of disrespectful. A spit in the eye. And yet she needed to remember this, to record it. Something was moving, changing, and it had to be documented somehow. Oh, for her trusty tape recorder, or a perfect memory. But she didn’t have a perfect memory. It would twist this moment out of all recognition just to fit her narrative. A psychologist _and_ a researcher, she knew not to trust anything to do with the mind.

Arthur raised his head and looked at her. “Wayne.”

“Yeah?” Her voice was weak, but at least it came out encouraging.

“Yeah.” He nodded and smiled, sweat-damp hair sticking to his face. “I wish he wasn’t dead. I wish he was mine.”

She glanced at the medicine cabinet. _Can I trust you to stay put for ten seconds?_

As if he heard the thought, he grinned and shrugged, and what the hell did that mean? She didn’t know, but then she never knew. Weariness filled her, but the crisis seemed to have hit a lull, so she got up and used her arm to sweep the razors on the table to the side farthest from him. Through the corner of her eye she saw him giggle under his breath. Taking a moment to calculate distance and speed, she ran to the medicine cabinet and yanked it open. Gauze, alcohol, pills, everything, she just raked it all into her arms and hurried back to where he sat staring into space, goosebumps all over him.

“I wonder if he hit him too?” he mumbled as she sat behind him and uncorked the alcohol bottle. Dousing a cotton wool ball, she pressed it to the gory H on his back, and he didn’t even react. He just shook his head – barely noticeable, but his hair shivered a little. “Probably not. And if he did, that British guy would have intervened. What a knight in shining fucking armor.”

She wiped the wound clean and cut some gauze to put on it. She tore a piece of tape with her teeth and stuck it to his skin.

“Just one more reason to do this,” he murmured.

She turned him round and looked at his face. He seemed out of it, elated, the aftershock of adrenaline perhaps. “Do what?”

“Kidnap Bruce.” He sniggered.

She cocked her head. “Are you sure that… How does that fit into the rest of our plans?”

“Like a glove.” He grinned up at her, endorphins apparently running wild after his brush with death. “Hahah!” He clapped his hands together. “It’s perfect. I’ll _interview _him. Won’t that make you happy?”

She frowned, unsure. “Torture him?”

He snorted and slapped his knee. “Phaugh, torture. That’s so _relative_, Harley. You of all people should know that.” Before she could stutter a reply, a defense, whatever, he said, “Grab your book, we need to plan this. It’ll be _so fun_.”

She had no choice but to obey. She’d pushed enough buttons tonight and had to pay with utter meekness. She didn’t just fetch the book, she emptied her whole bag of ideas on the floor between them. When she sat down again and opened the book on a new page, she was rewarded with the hint of a smile – and her heart bled out. It was more than enough. Even for her, who wanted everything at once and preferably yesterday, she felt it in her very marrow: that elusive warmth, even from a madman. The gossamer approval that made her cling to what was almost nothing, but when that almost-nothing touched her, it was as close to heaven as she’d get.

“Okay, what do I put?” she asked, voice all business and normal and I-didn’t-just-stop-you-from-bashing-your-own-head-in. “‘Kidnap Bruce Wayne’?”

He beamed. “It’s a start.” Then he made a sudden grimace, as if stabbed. 

Harley clenched her teeth, gripped her pen tighter. _Don’t reach out, don’t make it worse_.

“So tell me," he forced out, trying for normal. "Where does he fit?” 

He gestured at the mess between them, at the myriad sheets and post-its and ripped pieces of paper that comprised the project so far. Lined, squared, plain. Yellow and white, even some pink. Black text in Courier, Times New Roman, longhand, stenography. Boxes to tick or to fill with text. Ideas scattered across paper, to do’s and quotes and hunches, _has Mister Lanois answered yet?_ and _maybe if Miss Nakamura says yes to a collaboration I can send her this folder_. A collection of threads, an invisible hierarchy, and all she had to do was put Bruce in his logical place.

“I think…” She fumbled for the words to convey that she knew what she was doing. But she couldn’t summarize the new structure in one sentence after having looked at the scraps for a mere minute. Was that what he expected? She looked at him, and the smile he shot her was skeptical, amused, challenging, teasing, maddening. She shut it out to save herself from a white-out – that dreaded explosion of synapses that left her head a box of stark bright emptiness. “We take him when he comes down from a high. After an arrest. We sacrifice Mister… Wright.”

She meant to go on, but his fingers straightened slightly and lifted. She fell silent. “Why are you so… _interested_?” he asked for the millionth time. “To do this, you have to be so fucking interested. In me.”

She didn’t move a muscle. Whatever her facial capillaries thought they were up to, they could think again. ”I’ve already told you,” she said tonelessly. “It’s an obsession.”

“I…” He shook his head. “It’s appalling. I should be disgusted, but it’s exactly what I need. To have someone just _know_.”

His eyes narrowed – there was the wolf again, the dangerous animal that told her yes, he needed her, but she’d stirred a hornet’s nest tonight that was out of bounds, and he hadn’t decided yet what to do about it. Their eyes snagged in each other and she spilled a nervous laugh. They hovered around the silence like rival hummingbirds for a too-long moment. Then he grabbed her hand and smiled – a normal gesture in any situation but this. A warm smile, or a warm hand, or both, she wasn’t sure, she couldn’t separate the impressions. For a moment she was too _there_ to know what was happening.

He let her hand go. “Alright. Let’s start.”

And so she wrote while he murmured the beginnings of his fantastical scheme. _Scribble scribble scribble_, the female assistant sweeping a path for the male genius who ignored all other aspects of his life to focus on honing his craft. Straight out of _Propping Up the_ _Patriarchy 101_, but then so was everything. Besides, she was honing her craft too. She was the queen of her own kingdom, the Watson to his Holmes. The one to watch and record, and without her there would just be sea surf: a fragile froth that popped its own bubbles, quiet and relentless, a molecular dance that distracted like the magician’s hand until suddenly, it was over. The moon’s eclipse, the cessation of gravity. One day would be his last, and what she hadn’t written then wouldn’t exist.

The irony was, of course, that by then it would no longer matter. All this careful collecting of tiny nothings… when he drew his final breath, she would burn the lot.


	3. Want

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I want your touches to scar me so I'll know where you've been  
I want you to watch when I go down in flames  
I want a list of atrocities done in your name  
I want to reach my hand into the dark and feel what reaches back
> 
> ([Recoil](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZST-Ok7VUo))

It was morning. Of course you couldn’t tell in their windowless dungeon, not the traditional way. There was no light seeping in, no brightening of corners. Just a slightly different tang to the air.

She knew he felt it. He’d contacted his minions, set them up like chess pieces on the checkered board of Gotham, and the great dance was about to start. Away from it all, the two of them sat on the bed, all their plans finished and set in motion, their roles in the pageant on hold. Now all they could do was wait.

He sighed. “You can relax, you know.”

She became aware of the tension in her shoulders. Nervousness, perhaps, but it didn’t feel like it. “I’m fine.”

“I’m not going to kill myself. I have something to do now.”

She scoffed. “Because it was sheer boredom that made you take a baseball bat to your head? I’ll keep that in mind. Make sure you’re always occupied.”

He turned to look at her, eyes narrowed in the white of his makeup. “You’re angry.”

“What? No.”

“Yes, you are.”

She said nothing. The electric heat coursing through her wasn’t anger. It was excitement. She wanted this. It was a thrill. It was the culmination of everything. It was…

Wrong.

_Fuck_.

Something was wrong. She felt it in her bones. The way it grated against all that she was, this entire situation, the waiting, the plans, the way he sat half turned away from her, the itchy worry without a name, the whole fucking thing.

He pursed his lips, and the red shifted in his face. “Harley…”

Her stomach knotted. That tone… She loved it, and she hated it. It snake-charmed her, but she dreaded the coming sting, the uncushioned truth about to be unleashed. Hated him for always knowing, always seeing.

“You really have to make friends with your anger if you’re to survive this.” he murmured, softness a contrast to the intended barb. “Stop pretending you were _born_ angry and confront the real reason.”

“What reason could I possibly have?” she asked with all the cloying sweetness she could muster. “I’ve never encountered a hurdle in my entire life. Unlike _you_.”

He made a face as if to say, _now now, down girl_. “Something made you like this.”

“Things don’t always happen to make people ‘like this’, whatever that means. Maybe I just get a kick out of being mad?”

He chuckled. “Mmm… no, I don’t think so.”

She threw her arms up. “I’ve told you. I’m sick of thinking differently, of defending an opinion while everyone else is in oh-so-charming agreement all the fucking time. What more explanation do you need?”

“Yes, but… you’re with me now. No need to parrot the opinions of sheep any longer. I welcome dissonance, you know that. So who are you still trying to convince?”

She sighed. “What do you want me to say?”

He smiled, looked down briefly as if preparing another line of attack. “I know it matters a lot to you what I think, but–”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“I matter to you because I’m all you have. Doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.”

She shrugged moodily. “So I’m not completely antisocial. Some would take that as a sign of sanity.”

He snorted. “To be loved by Joker?”

“Oh shut the f–” She stopped. “What?”

The dangerous light was in his eyes, but she didn’t heed it. It was too tempting. She couldn’t leave it alone. Like Indiana Jones and the golden bust. She just had to have it. “You don’t love. Not anymore.”

He looked up at the ceiling in a parody of thought. “True,” he said, irony and sincerity so meshed it was impossible to tell them apart. “Is that what you want from me?”

“I don’t want anything.”

He rolled his eyes. “Sure you do. And you’re not getting it. So tell me.”

“And give you ultimate power over me?”

“Yes.”

She raised her eyes to his. “I don’t know.”

“Come on, Harley…”

“I don’t know!” she snarled. “You ask me what I’m angry about, and what I want from you, and that’s the fucking answer to fucking everything, I _don’t know_.”

He looked taken aback for a moment. Then his features softened with a kind of wonder. “And _that’s_ what scares you?”

She swallowed.

“Poor Harley. To _not know_.”

Their eyes met, and her stomach flipped painfully. She had him, he was hers more than he was anyone else’s.

_But_…

She tried to understand it, and in the trying, her brain divided his face in two, like her grandfather taught her long ago: half of a person’s face was open and vulnerable. The other half was guarded, dangerous. Together they made up a whole. But if you wanted to see a person’s soul, you could only do it one half at a time. One side: eyebrow like an eagle’s wing, dipped deep into sternness, cruel and cold. Fear made stone. Line from nose to mouth a sneer in the making. The other side: inviting, young. Calm. Sweetness painted with the finest brush, mouth touched with pink...

She couldn’t read it. She didn’t know which half to believe, what picture to see.

She opened her mouth to say something, change the subject, and there it was, right on cue: the piercing trill of the fucking phone.

A smile spread on Joker’s face, a true smile under the painted-on one. “It’s time.”

***

The room was suitably dark and dank, a comic book location with pipes overhead and concrete floors. A single chair in the cutting light from a barred window, the kind of thing that would look cool on a splash page. She scribbled a few ethnographic details: the cold, the crisp echoes, the sand underfoot.

But the man tied to the chair defied description. She saw it in the way Joker stopped on the threshold, wrapped in shadows and hesitation. There was danger there. Even bound to that rickety chair, he looked ominous. Like a hand grenade about to explode.

But how could he explode if he was their captive?

“Thank you,” Joker said into the darkness, and his men melted away. There was a moment of nothingness, of _what now?_ – and then something else took over.

Giggling excitedly, he grabbed another chair and sat in front of Bruce, like a mirror. Still in the shadows, her pen stopped. The likeness between them, his own face, bruised by his servants… How could she write it? She couldn’t. Instead she made a quick sketch, hand cramping with speed, with the need to get it done before they had to let him go, send him back out into the world a bit worse for wear, a tag around his neck saying, _I chose to let him go_. _Will you ever figure out why?_

“Hello, Bruce,” Joker whispered, the crazed light switched on in his eyes.

“You again,” Bruce muttered, lisping through a trickle of blood. “The entitled boy who whines about not getting the same size cake as everyone else.”

Joker smiled – a chilling sight, even now, even for her. “Says the man who has all the things I don’t.”

Bruce looked up. “Except parents.”

Joker’s lips parted. Wow. That was an unexpected turn. Harley’s pen hovered over possible avenues. There were a million things to say about that.

“_Pa_-rents,” Joker mumbled, nodding slowly. He slipped a hand into his chest pocket and fished out a playing card. He twirled it around between his fingers, and Bruce followed the movement with his eyes. Did he realize it had been tampered with? “You know how much I’ve talked about my fucking parents? You should try spending a few years in an institution.”

“You’re going back in there.”

“Eventually, yes.”

“You sound as if you want it.”

Joker said nothing.

“You know the police will come to my aid.”

“I’m sorry, but they’re otherwise engaged.”

Bruce narrowed his eyes. “What have you done?”

Joker giggled and waved the card in front of his eyes. “Just another levelling of the playing field.”

“What?”

“Removing the blinders. Baring the bones.”

“What are you talking about? Stop talking in riddles.”

“Riddles?” Joker scoffed. “That’s beneath me. I leave that to others. Riddles, phaugh…”

“Beneath you?” Bruce shook his head. “That’s rich. You think you’re so high up, but you’re just a lowlife with a score of rats at his beck and call.”

Joker shrugged, focusing on the card, as if deciding where to start. One foot tapping the floor impatiently, whispering _get on with it, cut him up_.

“You need to be adored at all times, or you think you don’t matter," Bruce said. "There are loads of people who aren’t seen, but they don’t resort to crime.”

What, he had a death wish too? Did it run in the fucking family? Harley winced as she wrote down what he'd said. It was too close to what she’d said the first time she’d met Arthur, and it was still true. There were dandelion kids who grew up to become mouthpieces for the downtrodden, who worked to save others from what they themselves had lived through. Who didn’t want to see others suffer what they had suffered, who made sure the hereditary sin ended with them. People like Bruce.

And then there were people like them.

“Poor Arthur,” Bruce taunted, a brave move from someone who was tied up in a room full of people who wanted him dead. “Poor little boy. Nobody’s treating him fair.”

Joker’s nose twitched, and the playing card stilled in his hand.

“Is that it? You’re a grown man, Arthur, in the land of fucking opportunity. You just have to grab it.”

“Oh, I’ve grabbed it.” He took hold of Bruce’s chin, tried to hold him still while he sought a good angle for the playing card, grinning at the way Bruce wriggled and fought. “You thrive on being anonymous, don’t you? What would it take, I wonder, to remove that anonymity?”

Bruce tried to kick him, and the chair made a little jump.

Joker laughed. “You have masks that cover your whole face, I hope? Because when I’m done with you, you’ll have a smile that everyone recognizes.” He placed the playing card on Bruce’s face, and he went still. Chest heaving, he was pressed like a rod against the back of the chair, trying to get away and trying not to move at the same time. “Isn’t this just swell?” Joker tittered. “I can’t think of a better, more poetic twist. Right at this moment, my rats are at your factories, chewing through the production line, and here I am, compensating for it with a different kind of fake smile.”

Bruce blinked, visibly confused.

“Yee-aah,” Joker grinned, nodding as he saw the truth of it dawn on his adversary. “What will people do tomorrow, when there are no more happy pills?”

“No more...? Are you crazy?”

Joker nodded, barely containing himself. “Yes. And so will everyone else be. Let me tell you what will happen. First they will loot the pharmacies. Punters’ last stand.” He cackled. “And then?” He leaned closer, caressed Bruce’s cheek with the card. “Then comes cold turkey. A city full of dopamine junkies all cut off at once.”

“You’re truly evil.”

“So many people calling in sick, the whole country will grind to a halt.” Joker pressed the card into the corner of Bruce’s mouth. “So many truths bared at once. The myth busted on a national scale, impossible to deny. It’ll be glorious.”

“You want the world to stop just so you can gloat?”

Could he grin any wider? “_Yes_.”

Bruce’s eyes flicked to Harley, and his throat moved. She froze for a moment, pen slippery in her grip. “It’s so easy to blame your failures on others, isn’t it?” he tried, and got another laugh.

“Actually it’s not. I blamed myself for the longest time. It took me half a lifetime to identify the perpetrators.”

“The perpetrators? You don’t think he hit me too?”

The concrete sang with the echo of it. Joker hesitated.

“You’ve wondered, haven’t you? Well, there’s your answer.”

Joker grabbed his lapels. “You think I want to get back at the world because our shitty father tied me to a radiator? Who’s delusional now? It’s much more banal than that. I just hate your rules. I hate the rules that make you win.”

Bruce grimaced in pain. “I’m not winning.”

“That’s right. Because I followed my own rules. You see, this world… We’re born into it against our will. Some people like being here, others don’t. Either way, we’re expected to play by the rules, even though we didn’t make them. And if we don’t play by the rules, we’re wrong. And if we’re not happy with our lot, we’re wrong. But if we try to leave, we’re also wrong. So what do you do? You sell us pills to make us forget. You force-feed us happiness. Because we’re supposed to be grateful for things we didn’t ask for. We're supposed to shut up and play the game. But we didn’t invent the game. We never wanted to play.”

“So you’re making your own game.”

Joker nodded. “Exactly. Now you're getting the hang of it. But somehow that ends up being wrong too. Now why is that? I can't play my games, but you can play yours?” He tutted. "Seems a little lopsided."

Bruce’s eyes narrowed. “You don't want to play a game, you want to _leave_ the game.”

Joker grabbed hold of his hair at the back of his neck – a jarring sight, it was the way he grabbed Harley's, and there was love in there, gentleness amid the aggression. “You know, what you don’t get is this: it doesn’t matter that you belong to a powerful group if they don’t accept you as one of their own. When you’re alone in enemy territory, it doesn’t matter that you’re a lion. You have no protection.”

“Gotham’s underworld protects you.” Bruce turned his head in Joker’s grip to look at Harley. “To say nothing of _you_. The whole of society protects you. And what do you do with it?”

She clutched her notebook a little tighter. Joker glanced at her and winked. There was the afterimage of a smile, she didn’t catch it until it was gone, and goddammit despite the situation, despite the cold and the nervousness and the straight up shock of seeing their plans become real, she felt the warmth of it. Of him. The feeling of belonging.

Did she belong? Would he ever let her in completely?

“Yes, let’s hear what the good doctor has to say,” he said softly.

She swallowed. The ball was in her court, but she had no idea what kind of ball it was. “So..." She cleared her throat. "What do you, um… think? Feel.” She frowned, feeling foolish. “How does it feel to know that… well, that one of your veins is cut, basically? Please be specific, I really do want to know.”

Joker tittered quietly, and Bruce stared at her. “How it _feels_?”

“Oh…” She made a show of acting surprised. “You don’t feel things? That’s your secret? You take your own pills?”

“I don’t take any fucking pills,” Bruce snarled, and she couldn’t stop a small laugh. When she looked at Joker, he was grinning, looking… proud? Her heart fluttered in her chest. Yes. This was her area.

“You make do with the mask, then.” She nodded. “If people can’t see what you feel–”

“You’re one to talk about masks!” he spat. “You’re shacked up with the king of faces here.”

Joker’s eyes twinkled – she could see him savoring the epithet, so she jotted it down just in case. “And, um…” she said as she jabbed the paper with a full stop. “How does it feel behind your mask? Does it make you feel invincible? Or just foolish? What’s it like to see yourself in a mirror?”

Bruce shook his head and muttered, “Psychologists.”

“What’s that?”

He looked up sharply. “Funny how the branch of research that has the most problems with quality is the one called qualitative research, don’t you think?”

“What the hell would you know about research?”

He tried to shrug, and the chair squeaked. “My father knew yours.”

A whiplash in her chest. _What?_

Bruce smirked. “Maths, wasn’t it? A _real_ subject. Emeritus now, of course, but a name in his day.”

She swallowed. “He’s got nothing to do with this.”

“No?” Bruce narrowed his eyes at her, and she averted hers, pretended to write again. “So what goes into your book tonight? Something to solve the riddle of how someone becomes a murdering maniac? The nut cracked once and for all, to make daddy proud?”

She looked up again, and her gaze snagged in the flesh-mask of his face. Even without his bat disguise he was covered, protected. How? His façade was a collection of lines that made up a whole she couldn’t divide into parts. Because he was unbroken. He was a single person, for all his tragedy, for all his nighttime shenanigans. It was the true divide: he had something he believed in, a unifying ideology, and she was as motley as her tights. A kaleidoscopic human, impossible to fit into the system. Only solution to step outside of it, and someone like him would never understand.

“You’ll have to wait for the article to know the answer to that,” she forced out, even though she knew there would never be one – she was no longer affiliated to a university and so there was no weight to her name. What she thought, what she saw was meaningless without the stamp of approval from a department. She glanced at Joker, seeking support, or something, she didn't know, she should know by now that he only doled that out when he wanted to, not on demand.

Bruce glared at Joker, and his nose twitched – a familiar tic that pierced her heart. “Is he really that irresistible?” It wasn’t an accusation, just a fact, tossed out as if there wasn’t a world of warped affection tied to it. “Or is he just a replacement for your old man?”

“You tell me,” she shot back, and to her satisfaction it registered in his face. _Yeah, take that. You’re just as obsessed as I am_.

He smiled, she thought he smiled, she couldn’t be sure because her head was buzzing. “Is it because you think he’s smarter than you? Is that the fascination?” His gaze skewered her, and she battled an instinct to take a step back. 

“I… don’t…”

At that moment, Mister Lanois came walking, a mobile phone held out towards Joker. “It’s done.”

He frowned. “So what do they want?”

Lanois shrugged. “Praise, instructions for the final touches, what do I know?”

Joker rolled his eyes, took the phone, and moved off into the shadows. Bruce gazed at Harley for a moment. Then he jerked his head at her, a sign to move closer. She didn’t want to do his bidding, but she was curious. What did he think he could accomplish? How did he want to corrupt her?

“You only respect people you see as intelligent, right?”

She wanted to object, but Bruce cut her off.

“You _tolerate_ everyone. You’re courteous with everyone. But you don’t respect them.”

She swallowed whatever lies she might have cooked up.

“Because it drains you to lower yourself to their level?” He smiled, a pensive smile as if he was sussing her out at the very pace her thoughts flitted through her head. Could he read them? Did they all register on her face and she’d never known? “And it’s not any old kind of intelligence you crave either,” he said. “They have to be emotionally astute as well. That’s not a low standard to have. And when someone lives up to it… whew. Were you even prepared for it? Did you know when you went to him – did you suspect? Or did he knock you out without warning?”

Her face warmed. Bruce watched her closely, watched his words take root. Her fingers twitched, but she had no idea what to write. Was he right? Did she seek this servitude so she could finally, finally breathe? Did she long to kneel at the feet of intellectual authority? Images from the interview at the hospital, black spots in front of her eyes. The wunderkind, the impossible child. The way he alienated everyone with his intelligence. The way he used it to make people think he was stupid – or perhaps he was? How did you know? How did you know if you were eons beyond everyone else or a complete dunce? Who was the ultimate judge?

“Did you think he was an easy prey because he did that whole can’t-spell-to-save-his-life act, and when you realized the trap had already sprung shut? And oh, how wonderful it was inside that trap. You finally got to submit again.”

“What the fuck are you–”

“Don’t worry, I get it. You’re not religious, so you have to get your god cravings somewhere.”

“I don’t want to submit. _I’m_ actually the one who…”

Who what? Drew her little arrows and made her little sketches? Paraded the fruits of her ruminations into the kitchen with the pride that went before a _well done, but you’re wrong_? She looked down at her shoes, and they were pink patent leather. White socks, chubby little legs, and a skirt. _Look what I did. Look at my grades, at my essay. Look dad, no hands._ Her head swam. Time was meaningless. Your wounds could heal and the thin white line cover them like nothing had ever happened, and then suddenly you passed that way again, the place the blow was dealt, and _rrrrip_ the bloody fronds gaped wide as if you never left. Like life saying _fuck you and your fake_ _fucking recovery. Fuck moving on, and fuck anyone who thinks they can one-up my backwards timeline_.

They were all just one step away from bleeding to death.

“Why are you saying this?” she whispered.

“Not much else to do around here.”

It was a joke. Ha ha. She even smiled a little, but the surface meaning was nothing. What he really meant was something else, and she’d only now caught on: he was helpless against Joker. His only hope was prying her away from him. Why? Why was that such a big goal?

Because… “He needs me.”

Heinous words, ridiculous. Embarrassing and pompous. Hubris in the extreme. And yet they fell into place like pieces in a puzzle, each bit linking to the next in a perfect pattern. She held her breath, afraid to have provoked some jealous Norn of fate, to have jinxed her entire existence, but nothing happened. No hell-finger reached up to strike her down, no chasm opened at her feet.

Bruce just cocked his head in quizzical amusement. “You’re a glorified secretary.”

And there it was: the rending cloth, the gulf of utter dread. She was no one in Joker’s life. The connection she’d imagined was a sham, a cosmic prank. Behind that almost-smile she’d imagined specially crafted for her, there was just a void.

Her heart. It was ashes.

Bruce’s face smoothed out, grew younger, brighter. “Harley…” he murmured. “You had everything. You can have it again. Help me.” He leaned forward, spoke like the whisper of a moth’s wing. “_Untie me_. Just think: a hundred articles on the most elusive criminal on the planet. The charismatic poster boy for madness. You think you’re the only one who’s interested in that? You’re not. Everyone wants a piece of it. You’d be an overnight sensation.”

Before she could form words, Joker came walking back, an evil grin on his face. “Well, you’ll want to invest in something new, Mister Wayne. Pharmaceuticals have taken a hit today.” He chuckled and tossed a knife to his guards. “Cut him loose when I’m gone.”

When _I’m_ gone? He stalked off towards the exit, and Harley followed him with her eyes, confused.

“See?” Bruce smiled. “He doesn't need you. How about you entertain my offer?”

She felt dizzy: his offer? Everything she’d ever wanted - no, everything she was _supposed _to want. The only things a brain as small as his could fathom. The real world with its rewards for good behavior. Money and fame, scholarly recognition, invitations to conferences, a keynote speaker for all eternity. The devil tempting her on top of the mountain, but what he showed her was nothing but glamor. The kingdoms he offered was flimsy scenery, cardboard pretense. And he thought waving her father around would tip the scales? 

When the only thing she wanted was a precarious seat at the discarded children’s table.

Turning, she ran after him.


	4. Absolution

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As a child, with your mind on the horizon  
Over corpses, to the prize you kept your eyes on  
Trying to be the chosen one  
All those things that you desire  
You will find here in the fire
> 
> ([Ghost](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR2rm8aXp6s))

“If there’s one thing I don’t get, it’s that pampered upper class boys have the nerve to tell me I’m acting entitled!” He slammed the car door, almost before she’d made it inside. “I had _nothing_, and they have everything.” He bundled up in the corner of the seat like a tantrum-throwing teenager, all crossed arms and impotent menace, and Harley had to turn away briefly to battle a laugh.

“Where to?” the taxi driver asked, and she told him. It was one of Joker’s most infuriating quirks, that he insisted on traveling in public, like some kind of twisted Russian roulette of transport. Each journey could be their last. If someone recognized the most wanted man in the country and didn’t just chalk his painted face up to wannabe copycatting, they were done for.

But so far they’d all just rolled their eyes. The clown face was the most unexpected hiding place, and every single driver had just taken them home – almost-home, that is. A block or so away, and different every time. Joker wasn’t completely insane.

“That’s the prerogative of power.” Harley sat back, hoping the partition was dirty enough to blur her face a little. “To tell those without it they’re being greedy for wanting it.”

Joker turned dark eyes on her. “_You_ believed it.”

A jolt, among so many. Her life with him was a series of fucking jolts. Never a moment’s peace. “I still do,” she said softly. “To some extent.”

He stared at her, and she stared back. _I can be a handful too. So throw me out of a speeding car, go ahead, freak._

__“You think I’m entitled.”

She spread her hands. “So what if you are? What’s the alternative? You’re a meek doormat who does what he’s told? How is that better? Or you’re a self-sufficient go-getter who believes in the American Dream? We’re all idiots, Arthur. Don’t waste your time mulling on your particular brand of it.”

“Says the queen of mulling.”

She shot him a sweet smile. “Don’t make me caress you.”

He relaxed against the backrest with a snort, and she rolled her head towards the window and let her gaze get lost in the bustle of midday streets. It was like watching a movie. They’d just left a disused shop cellar where they’d had a completely pointless rendezvous with the Bat, and out there people were hurrying to find a lunch place before it got too crowded. How could it be the same planet?

“You think I’m entitled,” Joker muttered again, petulant child demanding her approval, her loyalty.

“Yes, but before you go spinning a yarn about how I agree with Bruce Wayne now, that’s not what I’m saying. When I first met you, it was cut and dry. I would have agreed with him. But it’s not as simple as I thought. Because…”

“Yes?”

She heaved a dramatic sigh. “I don’t fucking know.”

A smile tugged at his lips. “Well, _I_ know.”

Ah, this constant battle of wits. The seesaw dizziness of never ever being equal, because neither of them knew how to do it. They just knew how to dominate or be dominated. “Yeah?” she said, playing into his hands because she was actually curious.

“Yeah.” Disentangling himself from his own limbs, he leaned in close, close enough to almost kiss her, but she knew not to reach for his lips because he’d only draw away with a smirk. “Because your _theories_ said so,” he sing-songed, laughter in his voice. “Your _books_. But as we already know, they don’t measure up.”

_Ouch_. She looked away, bothered. She hadn’t expected him to brandish _that_ weapon all of a sudden. She was a researcher, a reader, she believed in books. And yet what had she done? Abandoned all knowledge from the great canon to pursue her own harebrained ideas. “You’re not turning me into a book burner,” she muttered.

“Just a computer smasher.”

She couldn’t fight down an embarrassed smile. “_That_… was an independent decision.”

“Yeah?” His voice, so childish, so calculated, so playful. He was drawing her out like a kitten, only to bring her down with a lion’s paw once she’d accepted the challenge. It was fucking exhausting.

“Yeaaah,” she sighed, longing to lie down with him, to curl up close like she’d done with other men, to have him hold her. But it was like asking a rocket to sail the seven seas. Didn’t compute.

And yet something was different today. He was more kittenish than normal. An echo from the Murray Show, she realized with a start. The fumbling coyness of someone who still thought he could seduce the crowd if he was just good enough. The unabashed happiness when he thought he’d made a connection, only to be turned into murderous hate when he understood that he hadn’t.

Did he want connection? Was there still a part of him that could?

_Be still, my heart_.

She cleared her throat. “Well, after today I just hope…” How to put it? How to avoid the backlash if he decided her input was unwanted? “I hope you realize that Bru… that our mutual friend will never…” She glanced at the driver, who averted his eyes in the rearview mirror. “… see things your way,” she said, hoping it was vague enough if she was overheard. “So you’d better stop chasing it.”

Joker scoffed. “I won’t leave him alone. This is a dance that will never end. We’re eternally bound.” He made a sarcastic face, again reminiscent of the show, how he’d looked when he explained his actions with a cliché because no one would understand the real reason. “Light and darkness, don’t you know.”

“It only appears that way,” she mumbled, frowning at the driver. He seemed familiar somehow. “It’s all grey. All entropy.”

“Is that your professional opinion?”

She hesitated. Looked inside herself at the million tiny shining dots, the stars in her that she liked to pretend was knowledge. That looked good and made sense when she said them, but in the end what were they but glamor too? “No. I have no opinion.”

Joker giggled. “You’re made of opinions, Ha–”

She shot him an angry look, and he swallowed the rest of her name. “What I meant to say was that I’m not a professional,” she said. “I don’t know anything. I just like to argue. To see the other side. Say anything to me and I can argue the opposite.”

Joker raised a cocky eyebrow. “I think I could say something you wouldn’t be able to argue with.”

“Yeah, what’s that?”

He grinned, shoulder raised to look bashfully teasing. “I’ll never tell.”

_Oh my God, I hate you so much._ What was he trying to achieve? This constant flirting… yeah, that’s what it was. He was flirting with her, and she fucking bought it. How was it possible?

“Not everyone responds to threats of violence, you know,” she said quietly, quiet enough that the car engine covered it. “Even tied up and helpless, _he_ had the upper hand.”

It wasn’t entirely true, but then what was? Every fact had its opposite in this world of topsy-turvy.

Joker pursed his lips. “I don’t see why not. He’s living with blinders on.”

“Because he wants to. He’d rather live with blinders than give in to…” She broke off to swallow. “Primal urges.”

Joker gave her a strange look. “Primal urges?” He let it hang in the air, let it draw some warmth into her cheeks before saying, “You mean he’d rather live a lie than accept the cosmic joke?”

Harley felt tired. She wanted to sleep. Just fucking sleep. “What joke?”

“All this civilization, for what? To make people feel bad for acting like the animals they are? Do _you_ get it? Do you _really_?”

She opened her mouth.

“I heard you talking to him.” He gazed at her, eyes bordering on translucent in all that white. “My phone call? It wasn’t a phone call. I wanted to hear what he said to you. What his hold on you was.”

She gasped. “It was a _test_?”

He shrugged. “I knew he’d get to you.”

“If you listened, you know he tried to win me over and failed.”

Joker continued staring at her, looking lost and young and dangerous all at once. “You’re one of them, so they know how to talk to you.”

Harley shook her head, holding his eyes hostage, _don’t look away, don’t flee from this_. “I’m not one of them.”

“You are. You’ve said so yourself.”

“Not… but _you_ said… A lion who’s not accepted… I’m _here_, aren’t I?”

He pressed his lips together, his chin trembled, and all the demons were fighting their way out. _Not here_, she pleaded silently. _Not in a fucking cab_. 

“And why are you still here?”

“Because…” She spread her hands, because what the fuck kind of question was it anyway, he knew there was no logic to the two of them, why did he need it now?

“You don’t know,” he translated her muteness. “Let’s just face it. You want to get back into your world, and I…” He drew a sharp breath, and his lips quivered. When he went on, his voice was shredded. “I want to get back into mine.”

“Yours?” She gave him an imploring look, hoping for truth, for reasons – for something to hold onto while he was acting this out of character, only it wasn’t out of character, he was as motley as her and anything was possible. “And where would that be?”

“The hospital.” His voice cracked, and he looked at her like a drowning man. “I want my pills, Harley. It’s all I want. My ticket to oblivion.”

So poetic. So fractured and nonsensical. “You just blew them to kingdom come.”

“Yes!” He started laughing, the naked cramping cackle of helplessness, and tears spilled over, streamed down his face.

Fuck. The driver. She hooked an arm around Joker’s neck and pulled him down into her lap, covered him with her jacket, but it was too late to hide. The guy in front frowned into the rearview mirror, and amid the confusion of the shaking man against her thighs she had that strange feeling again, that he was someone she knew. No, not knew, exactly, but knew _of_. Their paths had crossed, and now…

Now he pulled up to the curb. Oh, great. She moved over to the door, fumbled for the handle, _fuck fuck fuck_, should she toss a bill onto the seat, how would this play? They needed to get out of here _now_.

“Hey.”

The driver opened the partition, and she went deer-in-headlights still. This was it. The end. But what could he do, simple taxi driver that he was? This was no gun fetish loner with a twisted sense of purpose. There was only room for one of those in this car.

“Doctor Quinzel?”

She blinked. “Uh…”

The driver chuckled, embarrassed. _Embarrassed_? She felt completely unmoored. “Lucas, remember?” He gestured at himself, and then at the steering wheel. “Trying to pay back my student loans.”

She swayed where she sat. Joker had quieted down in her lap, and Lucas glanced at him.

“Is he alright? Should I drive to the hospital?”

Harley laughed – an explosive, disbelieving sound. Crazy. “No no, he’s… fine. No hospitals. We’ll get off here, if you don’t mind, what do I owe you?”

Lucas’s eyes narrowed. “We miss you at the university. Why did you leave?”

She stared at him, afraid to disturb the house of cards of his seeming unawareness. He didn’t know? No one knew? That was impossible. Or was it? Last thing they’d heard of her was the interview she’d given on TV. Yes, she’d smashed up department property, but they’d never seen her at Joker’s side. Never connected those dots.

“Uh, well…” She looked down at Joker, who lay very still, hair covering his face, hand gripping her pant leg. “You know, clinical work. People, uh, need me. Now more than ever.”

Lucas looked at Joker, nodding slowly, conveying understanding. _How tragic. All those losers trying to step into his shoes_. “Making home visits?” he asked. “Or outings? Exposure therapy?” He mouthed the word, “Agoraphobia?”

She almost laughed. “Oh, um… the opposite, actually.” She gestured at the cramped insides of the car. “Confined spaces.”

“Oh…” Lucas looked shamefaced. “So I’m prolonging the torture? I’m so sorry.” He stepped on the gas and rejoined the flowing traffic like the interruption had never been. “Still, seems like a waste, you know? Doctor Harleen Quinzel, spending her talents on… well, _patients_.”

“Some would call that reality,” she murmured, absentmindedly petting Arthur’s hair as they glided through the city in their cocoon of steel. Protected as always. But what if protection wasn’t what she truly wanted?

“Your old supervisor wouldn’t agree,” Lucas argued like the insufferable brat he was. “You know what he says about you?”

Harley sighed. That prick? Why would she even care what he thought? “No, I don’t.”

“He said you left just when you were on the brink of a breakthrough.”

Her hand stilled in Arthur’s hair. “What fucking breakthrough?”

“You have the ticket, don’t you?” His eyes met hers in the rearview mirror, a different feel about them now, a new urgency. Her throat closed. Was he saying what she thought he was saying? Did he guess after all? But no, when he spoke, it was with an incredible, defy-all-sense ignorance. “Didn’t you get to interview the actual Joker?”

Actual? As opposed to the man in her lap, his hair twisted around her fingers? The invisible one, whose superpower was to blend in with the crowd of ordinary, everyday lunacy. 

She grinned and shook her head. “You know, Lucas… The thing about understanding your subject fully is that your fascination for it dies. In the end, when I figured him out, Joker wasn’t half as interesting as you’d think.”

***

When they finally made it past their front door, she had no strength left in her to even stand up. The bed came up to meet her like a fatherly embrace. “Jesus.”

Joker collapsed beside her, makeup smeared beyond recognition, most of it on her pants now. “So I guess you didn’t want to go back.”

“What?” It came out exasperated.

He turned his head to meet her eyes. Mouth a cautious line of amusement or fear, or both, because it always was with him. “You had the chance, didn’t you?”

“You mean give myself up to a random doctoral student? What a pathetic fate that would have been. No, Arthur, I don’t want back in my world. I grieve it, but only like you grieve an illusion. Like you’re nostalgic for a time that never was. Those people don’t need my input, for all his fawning. They don’t want it. And I’m done making excuses for people who don’t even know I'm doing it.”

He reached up a finger and – unbelievably – stroked her cheek with it. “So you’d rather make excuses for a murderer.”

Jarred by the unexpected tenderness, she made her face hard to compensate for the softness inside. The full frown and all, chin jutting out in defiance. “You know what, I do. Because if I can find the method in your madness, maybe I can find it in mine.”

He smiled sadly. “You think you can pin me down with words. You can’t.”

“I know that. But I’ll continue trying.”

He turned fully to her, his growing interest a laser beam ready to disintegrate every shield. “Did you ‘continue trying’ to reach your father?”

She groaned. “Oh my God, why bring up such a _boring_ subject?”

He shrugged, pretending he didn’t care. “I heard what Bruce said.”

She sat up and turned away from him. “Just because the two of you have father issues doesn’t mean I do.”

But he had no intention of letting her go that easily. Laying an arm around her neck just like she’d done with him in the cab, he pulled her down with him, into the sheets, into the softness of cotton and all the things she yearned for but could never have. “And yet here we are.”

“What do you mean?”

“Bruce got under your skin.”

She sighed. “Fine. Yes, a little. But he thought I wanted to impress my father. That he could entice me away from you with promises of respect from authority figures in my field. But I gave up on that a long time ago. I can’t impress my dad. It’s not in his nature to let anything in. He always told me I was intelligent, but I never got to exercise that intell–”

She stopped. Frowned. This was an avenue she hadn’t been down, and she’d been down a few.

“He believed in you,” Arthur said softly, the slightest question mark in his voice: just a way to get her to talk.

And she did. Her voice was quieter now, breathy, the epiphany unfurling slowly like a flower in stop motion. “He did. But only as long as I toed the party line. He had no interest in listening to my theories, because they weren’t his.” She knew this, she’d known it always, but it hadn’t surfaced until this minute. It was a slow chill, a hollowing-out of her chest, her head, her whole world. A drain-sucking, brain-fucking annihilation of everything remotely resembling the reality she’d lived in her whole life. “Fuck. I never realized. Sure, he took pride in my intelligence, but he never let me convince him of anything. My brains were a party trick. Something to wave in front of teachers and neighbors, but when it came to actually listening to me and taking me seriously…”

“He didn’t agree with you, and you’re angry with him for that?”

“No,” she breathed, and the full weight of it descended on her at once. “He was _too stupid to understand_. Even him, my fucking role model. Where my intelligence must have come from, because my mother sure as shit didn’t contribute with anything.”

Joker chuckled, and she smiled back, because yeah, what could you do but laugh at it? She’d sprung from such subpar soil it was a miracle she’d made it this far.

“I outgrew him too early,” she said. “But I never realized. I mean, I knew I outgrew my mother at thirteen, but _him_… I didn’t think that was possible. Which means I’m an idiot. I saw things he didn’t, and he denied it, because if he hadn’t thought of it, it couldn’t exist. And I believed him. Believed, deep down, that I had nothing to contribute. Because every mystery had already been solved. He had all the fucking answers, and there was nothing left to discover because he wouldn’t let it happen.”

Arthur didn’t take his eyes off her face. It was a kind of love, wasn’t it, to watch someone so intently? To be so interested in a person that nothing else existed? But it was a sham, she must remember that. No one was interested in her, not really.

“Is that why you always need the final word?” he asked. “Because no one took any notice of little Harley?”

She winced. “Go on, be a dick.”

“I’m serious. You were just a mascot to people with half your IQ. Was that why you mutilated your dolls?”

She chuckled despite herself. “No. That was just a hobby.”

His eyes were such a conundrum, the way he looked so sincere, and yet behind them there could just be fairground lights and chaos. “So _your_ past is a lie, too.”

She rubbed her face, but it held. There was no more mask to take off. “I guess it is.”

“Then reject it.”

“Like you do?” She shook her head. “Then what do I have? The now, the future? I finally get to do what I want, and even that isn’t what I want. The way I am fits nothing. I get so excited planning with you, setting it all up, and then… Then it all just crumbles. Every time I think I’ve found my slot, the one thing I can do and love doing, it’s an illusion. Not even with you can I find a purpose.”

“You need a purpose?”

She said nothing.

“But you’ll never get a purpose with me. Just mayhem.”

“But the plans…” she murmured.

“The plans, the plans. Yes, you need to structure things to make people do what you want at the right time. But the end goal is the opposite of plans. What I do is destroy.”

_Destroy_… The word raced down her arms in thrilling goosebumps. Her hands declenched, because apparently they’d been balled into fists. When she raised them to her eyes, a series of nail-cutting half-moons dotted her skin like Morse code. Her body was marked by her history, by the razor-sharp edges of life, and the blood had dried in secret slashes. It felt right that such imperfections should be outwardly visible, if only for a minute. Like pock marks of the heart.

“Can I…” She hesitated. She didn’t even know what she wanted to ask.

“Torture me some more?”

She fell quiet. All that was audible was her pulse.

Then came his whisper: “Yes.”

She turned to look at him. _What?_

He nodded slowly, eyebrows knotted over shadowed eyes, jaw clenched. Tiredness etched in every crease of his aging face. She resisted an urge to pull his head closer, to force a kiss from those rough lips reeking of smoke.

“Why?”

“Because it’s…” He breathed in. “Information.”

“What do you mean?”

“That state. I reach further. Find out truths. That can help me.”

“And you go fucking insane and try to kill yourself.”

He spread his hands. “Hazards of the trade.”

“Arthur…”

“I want it.”

And Lord help her, so did she. She longed to sear him with her hands, to scar him. It was an ache so vague and all-encompassing it practically replaced her sense of self. It was everywhere, in all her cells, a poisonous trace element in just-below-lethal doses, smudging every tissue with electric blue.

Did he know? Did he grab this opportunity to bind her closer, give an inch? Time disintegrated as he took her face in cupped hands, Jesus, he slipped right into a movie script, knew every mannerism the bastard, and she knew it while it happened but it didn’t matter, because he did it so fucking _right_: the damp softness of his lips on hers, his skin and breath, and it was so soft, softer than it looked, and she hung on to life by a silken thread, about to fall, her soul tangled in the sheer-cliff-sweetness of it.

A moment of cold, of separation, then his lips met hers again, wet now, fully open. A soft strength molding itself to hers, accepting and inviting. A soft pressure that pried her lips open, a tongue that slowly slipped inside and over hers, the motions of someone who knew he was wanted and held the reins. Who didn’t engage emotionally but was doing this for her, to give her pleasure, and fuck it should make her mad, but instead she melted into mush. His breath came hot on her skin as they traded saliva. She was cared for, she was manipulated, she was manhandled into moaning for him.

Pushing him onto his back, she straddled him, laid her hands on him, pushed his shirt up. Buttons came undone, cheap green fabric fell away and revealed his naked skin. She owned him with caresses. For each stroke he winced, and yet he let her do it. The feel of it ached and pulled in unfamiliar places as she swept her palms over all that off-limits warmth, that unprotected body. The same muscles that contracted with adrenaline as he pulled the trigger, now they trembled under her soft invasion, and she thirsted for more, for more of the destruction.

Desperation took over the pace. Panicky-eager fingers fumbled between them and loosened clothes, found a way inside buttons and zippers, laid bare the truths inside, and for every step she took closer, he drew back, smiling his pain and his victory, inviting her to go further than she’d ever done, to lose herself on a path that could suddenly cease to exist. But so far it did exist, and it drew her feet, and the warning in her head – of an impenetrable thicket that would one day block her way – couldn’t deter her.

She stroked down his stomach, towards the no-go zone, and his face grew haggard. “Nothing will happen.”

“I know. Can I still touch you?”

He gave a nod that was almost non-existent, and she pried a hand inside his underwear. Was it insanity to even venture there? Was it wishful thinking, a misplaced kind of symbolism? 

She encircled his cock gently. “How does it feel?”

“Strange.”

“You do… touch yourself.”

“Sometimes. Nothing much happens then, either.” He covered his eyes with a hand. “And anyway it’s not… reciprocal for me.”

“What isn’t?”

“Sex.”

The whisper of skin, of tiny hairs trembling against each other, igniting electricity… It was all physical, and he didn’t need it. It was just for her. And still he gave it – why?

She leaned down and buried her face in his neck, pressed her body into the softness of his reluctant acceptance. His arms came around her like a malediction. She wanted to voice it in words, the fear, the ache that warmed and lessened at his touch, but all her words were lost. Words like miss and yearn and hope; words like time and wandering and echoing despair.

She drew back and looked at him. “I’ve spent my life trying to understand people, but no one ever returned the favor. No one ever understood me.”

“But I do.”

His eyes, his fucking eyes. They were framed in cinematic out-of-focusness, there was just him and those eyes, and everything behind and around was vaselined out. She couldn’t feel her toes, her thighs, her hands. She breathed through a straw. Inside her head there was a surge, an invisible pull beneath the waves, and the air was sucked out of her. She wasn’t sure she could bear it, and yet she clung to it with her soul like claws on a windowsill. Because in a minute, in a second it could be gone.

She closed her eyes. “I know you do. It’s why I…” She opened her eyes again, and the room looked different. Her heart was a vast emptiness, but so was the universe, and so was an atom. “… love you.”

It was done. Said. Etched in fucking stone. A lump rose in her throat but then died down, because it was such a banal truth that saying it didn’t change anything. She watched his face, expecting traces of a triumphant smirk, or a disgusted grimace, anything but what she saw.

Sadness and disbelief. “I think you have very little reason to.”

As the pillowcase darkened with wetness, she leaned down to whisper in his ear, “We’re both just a couple of entitled children who will never find peace.”

His hands came up to her hips, shy, fumbling hands that were much more at home twirling razor cards than conjuring pleasure. His lips sought a path up her throat, her chin, they found her mouth in a tangle of wetness and slick. His tongue was in her, pushing, fondling. He gripped her neck and filled her, devoured her, a beast feasting on a willing kill. Everything about him was strong and hot, a supernova of want.

Everything except _that_.

And yet he turned her over, pulled off her pants, lay on top of her. His sleepy cock nudged the slipperiness of her wanting him, the wetness that couldn’t lie. It pushed at folds that gave way a tiny bit, forced itself into her hot grip, and he twisted his hips to edge further inside, but why, why? He didn’t want this. Did he?

Looking down at her with pupils drug-dilated, he croaked, “This is as far as it’ll go.”

She nodded, breathless. They were one. He wasn’t remotely hard enough to fuck her, but they were joined. He was in her. She felt him, a tender presence, like another soul in the same body, and she could have cried. Somehow it felt right: no hard shaft thrusting, like the other men she’d known, no overpowering need to _get there_. Just a longing, a hampered urge to taste, to feel, to be an adult and have the things adults had.

And almost the capacity.

Cupping her face again, he whispered, “I could tell you the secret.”

She held her breath, stared up at him.

“There is an answer, Harley. To everything you’re wondering. But I’m not giving it to you. Not ever.”

Her whole being tingled with heat. “I…”

“No.”

He shifted a little, carefully so he didn’t slip out, and his cock nudged a part of her that sang quietly, impossibly, far beyond human frequencies. She’d never get what she needed, but that was what she needed. She’d think she’d found a meaning, and it would slip away. She’d try to catch his heart, and her hands would close on nothing, and yet a man such as him, perhaps nothing was his heart. 

She would ask the question again and again, and the answer would always be different. And whatever the answer she would never believe it, because nothing was ever constant. He was doubt. He was water. He was the fool, the child, the careless conqueror. He was no one and everyone, he was hers for a while, he was no one's. Perhaps he was his own. This man in her arms, this patchwork of pain and laughter, this cracked reflection of her. When he whimpered into her neck, it was the abandoned cry of those who would never reach, but would forever keep on reaching.

“I’m the prey,” he whispered into the dampness of her hair. “Chase me.”


End file.
